I Married Her Because She Looked Like You
After Jonathan left, Steve and Jess took the bedroom. He painted the place white, tore up the linoleum in the kitchen, threw drop cloths over the chairs, pared it down to nothing. Like he’d left, but was still there. At night he’d roll the futon out in the living room, pass out drunk to Mazzy Star, the Sundays and the soaring filigree of Bernstein’s Adonai Ro’i. Over and over, the fragility of that treble voice, like a reed, forever at the point of breaking. And the plaintive black key apogee, yearning towards the note it might have been, never getting there. Finish, rewind, repeat, just for that one note, furred into ecstasy by the booze. He had no idea what he was listening to. He knew it was Hebrew, because he’d sung it at school and been told. But nobody bothered with the words.
Adonai ro’i, lo eḥsar.
Bin’ot deshe yarbitseini,
Al mei m’nuḥot y’nahaleini,
Naf’shi y’shovev …
Gobbledygook. Only a couple of decades later did somebody tell him it was the Twenty-third Psalm. Adonai ro’i. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Huh. Forlorn, unloved and misbegotten, splayed nightly across his futon on the fag-end, flyblown carpet at Blythe Road, turns out he was holding hands with an angel who wanted nothing more than to let him know, again and again, that he was going to be okay. ‘For Thou art with me,’ piped the cherubim, ‘Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.’
Hope was so pretty he didn’t know what to do. He’d look away, then quickly look back like he was trying to catch her not being pretty. No good. Still pretty. But it was Harriet’s words that shuddered between his shoulder blades like an arrow.
‘The finest hour I’ve ever known was finding a pound on the Underground’.
Broke and nicking food, it was like some Manchester faun singing inside his head, a smudged angel by the packet soups in Sainsbury’s. Good times for a change. The whole fucking world was a lyric casserole. When one thing’s over but the other’s not begun. It’s always the bedrooms that tell the story. For I can’t help falling in love with you. And every little thing an epiphany: a pint down the pub: a glimpse of Caroline unobserved in Leicester Square: always a song. And oh, the knife that love was like.
Turned out Harriet wasn’t from Manchester, but Henley-on-Thames, and her dad was an architect. Finding a pound on the Underground my arse. Should have known, with a name like Harriet. The Blythe Road flat felt purged but broken, a child of divorce, its new surgical interior less emblematic of fresh fields than pride vanquished. Jonathan was gone, as was the yellow Cortina, the Bladerunner cityscape of stolen electronics, the featureless evenings strewn across the living room like corpses, watching snooker. The law of sibling fealty was broken. Without Jona’s touchstone presence – beakers of bucket Muscadet, Benson & Hedges pea-souper – his only recourse was to haul himself up by the skinny withers and retool as a bespectacled bachelor lothario. But realistically, what self-respecting post-punk pixie was going to succumb to the ministrations of a man who slept on a mattress in his own living room with a UB40 under his pillow? He sighed, shrugged, thumbed the leaves of his Filofax for enthusiastic near-misses.
Wooing Cassie meant Marks & Spencer Tikka Masala and a bottle of fitou, heavy payload for a flâneur sans emploi busily squeezing a multitude of sins out of one fishy Giro. But this wasn’t his first gymkhana, and he knew the drill. Good elevation over the early fences, plough the cross-rails, end up in the drink. And anyway, ‘Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window’. Weird lover Wilde was on his side.
In brewing the potion, he tranced himself back to those first days at the theatre in Battersea, when haughty indifference had borne her imperial across the foyer, a teenage Cleopatra on her barge. And later, when she let slip that first flicker of a smile at his autistic inanity and his heart vaulted from his chest, unbridled, like a centaur. And then. Then the slow march towards capitulation, a siege upon her heart and all parts south, culminating in a shoddy wooden horse teeming with the tiny termite Trojans of his love, all running rampant in the unlit basement next to Jona’s sunbed. And she was silky, scrubbed; clean as a whistle, plucky as a meerkat. And her lips were bossy when she kissed, instructional, like a governess’s sleeve-secreted hanky. No backward-toppling miasma for him, no helpless breast upon his breast, nor feathered glory from her loosening thighs. Just the threadbare flock of black mould, and the forest floor strewn with Karen the Cat’s lost fecal acorns.
And she was softer than he’d known, and smelled of berries.
Now, two years on with Tikka in hand, he saw her turning heads at High Street Kensington, and felt proud. All knowing smiles, they rode the tube once more to Baron’s Court, furred in the prickly nimbus of what was up love’s pipeline.
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